Mother, should I trust the government?

I’ve written a lot about breaches of data security at private companies (see examples such as this and this.)

But it turns out that data breaches at companies like ChoicePoint and Bank of America are nothing compared with the data that’s compromised because of poor government security.

David Lazarus, my counterpart at the San Francisco Chronicle, has more details on the government data problems in his column today:

A new report from the House Government Reform Committee finds that no fewer than 19 federal agencies have experienced security breaches since January 2003 — a total of 788 cases of people’s confidential data either being lost or stolen.

Because the federal government has no disclosure requirements in the event of security breaches, “few of these incidents have been reported publicly,” the report finds, adding that data losses have become “a government-wide occurrence.”

No wonder Congress wanted to water down legislation that would have held data compilers responsible for breaches.